Also, I was thinking maybe we should add typo bounties, like we have at http://messymatters.com, but now I’m thinking maybe we shouldn’t!

PS: That’s nice of you to call it a typo, as opposed to us not knowing how to spell. Really appreciate the careful reading!

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By: Blue Sky https://blog.beeminder.com/chunky/#comment-58113
Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:23:00 +0000http://blog.beeminder.com/?p=236#comment-58113Typo: I think you meant “tenet,” not “tennet.”
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By: Anonymous https://blog.beeminder.com/chunky/#comment-57422
Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:09:00 +0000http://blog.beeminder.com/?p=236#comment-57422Hey Arthur, intriguing thoughts!
Would you share your beeminder spreadsheet template(s) with me? E.g. by mail: arthur.o6ol@gishpuppy.com
Because I’m also considering beeminding in a personal spreadsheet, so I can tailor it to my needs and rapidly implement and try new ideas. Of course I’m going to share those with you and the beehive.

On beeminder, the yellow brick road represents the one and zero day safety buffer. It’s meant to alert you when you’re about to veer off track.

With that definition, chunky tasks are no problem. It suffices to maintain a large safety buffer (or add a bogus one at the beginning) and voila.
There’s another way to think about it…. I think of myself as having three regimes, a working regime, a procrastinating regime and an overdoing it regime. Each regime has a different rate of work ( hours / day ) and a different rate of work sessions (chunks) ( #N / week ). Furthermore, there are transition probabilities between regimes. The overdoing it regime is bad because it’s very likely to transition to the procrastinating regime.
Assume such a probabilistic model of behavior.On a given day, for every value that I can input tomorrow, there’s a subset of these values that imply a probability greater than 90% that I am in work mode. Typically it’s going to be an interval. Above the interval lies the overdoing it mode, below lies the procrastinating mode. The trace of that interval will form a band on the graph.
Another way to look at it that doesn’t involve the 3 regime model is to say that my latent rate of work follows a random walk and I want to pin it to a specific value.Of course, it’s quite hard to calibrate such a complex model, but there’s no need. We can make a simplification and say that the band is a straight line with a given width, and use a guesstimate of the width. Chunky tasks would have fat bands because of the high variance in the input data.

Leaving that band does not mean failure, and having to reset the graph. It’s only strong evidence that something’s wrong and that I need to refocus.

I *know* the yellow brick road is not that band. Still, I can’t help but think of it this way. I’ve beeminded in the past using excel spreadsheets, and this was what worked best for me.

So feature request: add an option to choose between a yellow brick road or an fat emerald highway.
For power users, you can even ask three numbers:
a) rate you want to maintain ( hours / week )
b) how often will you update beeminder ( times / week ) # assume poisson for simplicity
c) by how many % do you expect your inner rate of work to vary on a typical day # assume geometric brownian motion

Run a filtering algorithm, boom you have an automatically calibrated emerald band.

Things get interesting when you start getting a lot of users and a lot of data. Then you can actually start finding realistic models for procrastination (conditional on beeminding).

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By: Daniel Reeves https://blog.beeminder.com/chunky/#comment-38961
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:32:00 +0000http://blog.beeminder.com/?p=236#comment-38961 @jmccoh, great point, it actually works especially well for goals where you want to take weekends off, due to the way the width of the road is constructed. Nitty-gritty at http://blog.beeminder.com/roadwidth but the short version for these kind of time-based goals is that the road is just wide enough that reaching the top edge means you have 2 days of safety buffer.

So hit the top edge (green dot) by Friday night and you can do nothing on Saturday and Sunday. On Monday you’ll start below the road and have till the end of the day to get your time in and get back on the road.

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By: jmccoh https://blog.beeminder.com/chunky/#comment-38598
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 09:35:00 +0000http://blog.beeminder.com/?p=236#comment-38598As originally a skeptic as to whether or not I could track “non-daily” goals this does work vey well. I wanted to track behaviors that needed to be completed during the 5-day work week and was concerned that I would “lose” over the weekend but by creating the safety buffer I can always stay on the right side of the road, And by adjusting the steepness I can accommodate weeks shortend for holidays or any other cause. This works. Oh, and good job getting the dog food off of red.
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